Not exactly fresh news, this, a week old in fact, but I got a bit busy recently. The things we don’t know: apparently the Homicide Squad was earnestly looking for fallen skater Ben Pappas (pictured here and here) since not so long after his ex-girlfriend’s — Lynette Phillips’s — corpse was removed from Dights Falls and he promptly disappeared.
Pappas once earned $15,000 a month ranked second on the international skating circuit, but he said that at 13 he was smoking marijuana “flat out” every day, first used coke at 15, was a regular user two years later, and by 18 it was “part of my diet”. In 1999, when he was 21, the County Court confiscated his passport for 3 years for smuggling 100g of the stuff into Australia in his shoe.
A small patch of blood, which may or may not be his, and a message scratched into concrete were found at Victoria Harbour, near where his corpse was dragged from the water in the vicinity of where a skating exhibition had been found 3 days earlier: “Love u LL” “Mum” Nan”. The media buzz is that it was a suicide. An autopsy revealed an absence of trauma, consistent with suicide.
His wallet floated to the surface. A passer-by handed it in to the police. The desk jockey linked the name with the alert for the search for the person of interest. The water police motored down to the Harbour and fished out the corpse in a very low key exercise.
According to The Hun, Pappas had a “history of violence” against Phillips, who had an intervention order out against him.